You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Álvaro Enrigue
- Language: English
- Genre: Literary Sagas
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
BEFORE the NAP
Captain Jazmín Caldera, native of Zarzales, Extremadura, couldn’t eat
the turkey broth with flowers, though it looked exquisite and he was
starving. He had been assigned a place at the table between the priests of
Xipe and Tezcatlipoca. Draped like a cape around the shoulders of the
former was the decaying, blackened skin of a warrior sacrificed who knows
when, while the latter’s matted locks, neither cut nor washed since he’d
taken orders at the temple, were crusted with many moons of sacrificial
blood: quail daily, sometimes turtle or wolf, but on major festival days—of
which there was one each month—warrior blood, preferably Tlaxcalteca.
Jazmín Caldera reached out his hand for the fine lacquered cup, into
which a woman had poured chocolate frothed in water with honey, chile,
and vanilla, and breathed in the scent as deeply as he could, trying to ignore
the wolfish aroma exuded by his dining companions. He looked up toward
the head of the table. The captain general of the expedition was watching
him fixedly, those icy eyes ordering Jazmín to be quiet and eat his soup
once and for all.
Caldera turned his gaze to the left. The priest of Xipe was painted from
head to toe with black and blue stripes. Under the human skin he wore as a
cape, he had on a white robe patterned with shoots of corn in a featherwork
design. Two enormous jade disks hung from his ears, set around the edges
with gold and silver snakes. They must have been hideously heavy, surely
painful. Under his lip was a gold labret: a little dog’s head. It slipped in and
out of sight each time he took a swallow of soup or chocolate, as if playing
in a little skin house.
The priest of Tezcatlipoca was dressed less luxuriously, in a plain red
robe. His body, or what could be seen of it, was painted black, except for
the part of his face between nose and chin, which was also red. The ribbon
that tied up the towering, malodorous thatch on top of his head could have
graced the swanlike neck of the daughter of a Spanish grandee: freshwater
pearls, little jade heads, and coral animals chasing each other along a trail of
silver thread. His teeth were filed sharp as a cat’s.
Jazmín returned his attention to his plate, to his cup of chocolate, and
then again to the captain with his unrelenting stare, seated at the head of the
table elbow-to-elbow with Princess Atotoxtli. Now the captain raised his
eyebrows to punctuate the urgency of his command: Eat! Caldera lifted the
cup of chocolate and took a long swallow. Though the drink was possibly
his favorite of all the many extraordinary new things he had tried since they
had landed, it nearly came back up. It was impossible to dissociate it from
his tablemates’ reek of coagulated blood.
Even so, the immediate thrill of the cacao, to which the new arrivals
were as yet unaccustomed—a tickle at the base of the neck, a shudder of the
spine, the tremendous urge to do something, anything—made him suspect
that he could handle the soup despite the stench.
For More Read Download This Book
EPUB